Today we pushed up
some changes to the OpenNTF website. The previous area "IP and Legal"
has been split down into "IP" and "Legal". The Legal
area covers legalistic documents for aspects such as our bylaws, IP policy,
privacy policy etc. If you're looking for practical content about the IP
process and how to apply it, you should look instead at the IP area. A
lot of the content here has been restructured or slightly reworded to better
explain why we do it, why you want us to do it, and do make it less daunting
to implement. It may seem scary if you've not done it before, but in practice
it's very straightforward and our IP Manager Jesse Gallagher will help
you through any typically minor amendments, if they are needed.

Hopefully we've
updated all links within the site, but if you spot any or have ideas for
any improvements, please let us know either on the OpenNTF Slack chat or
posting to our @OpenNTF Twitter account.

When the free non-production
Domino server license was launched on developerWorks
earlier this year, it brought that area of developerWorks to the conscious
awareness for possibly the first time. I looked at the "Communities"
sub-page and, in particular, the "Social" area near the bottom
on the right. That highlighted that there were Twitter feeds being publicised
that were not being maintained. That needed addressing.

CollaborationToday
has a team curating the content that appears there in a variety of categories
and the Home Page of OpenNTF has a widget that displays new releases. There
is content that could and should easily be blogged by @Collab2day and
@OpenNTFProjects. But we're all busy people
and we endeavour to work smarter. There are tools to automate posting to
a Twitter account and one of those that I've been using since the end of
last year for various integrations is IFTTT.

For those who
haven't used it, IFTTT allows you to set up "recipes" which will
perform some action based on something else occurs (IFThis
Then That). Two of those endpoints are an RSS feed and Twitter.
So for a few months now we've had various recipes so that if there is a
new feed item, IFTTT will automatically post a tweet. But CollaborationToday
includes a variety of categories and few will be interested in all categories.
So to make the tweets more useful and more informative, there are different
recipes for each category, adding a prefix to the tweet depending on the
RSS feed category filter, as you can see below.

You can see the
result below:

Currently there
is no RSS feed for new project releases, so that is proving less straightforward
to automate. But obviously that's feasible, it's just going to take some
custom development.

UPDATE:
As a duplicate tweet just reminded me, I also set up an IFTTT recipe for
the main OpenNTF account to automatically tweet new stories via the OpenNTF
Blog RSS feed. The lesson to learn is automation is great until you forget
what you've automated!

Earlier this week,
at Social Connections, we announced the winners of the OpenCode4Connections
IBM Connections Customizer contest. To support the contest there was a
great amount of effort from Christian Guedemann, Martin Donnelly and others
to set up the infrastructure and enablement materials to help ensure the
contest was a success. Even though the contest only ran for a short period
of time, the numbers were impressive:

- over 40 organisations
were provisioned by IBM during the pilot phase- 20 organisations
developed or partially developed something for the contest- there were 11
submissions which went to voting and you can see all repositories on OpenCode4Connections' GitHub.

The winners were:

Enhanced Activity
Stream - Jay AgrawalThis project contributed
a notifier and infinite scroll to the Activity Stream in Connections and
was something Jay had previously built as custom code in the header.jsp
of the homepage of Connections and extended into the Connections Customizer.
As the ReadMe says, by taking
the code you can also add this functionality to a Connections 5+ instance.
Jay is also a first-time contributor to OpenNTF, so it's great to be expanding
our contributor-base.

Status Update
Tone Analyzer - John JardinThis project
is a very unobtrusive contribution which analyzes the tone of the status
update, allowing the user to review before posting. The status is analyzed
in intervals of 2 seconds while the update is typed. In the screenshot
below it's been highlighted because, as I'm sure you can tell, it blends
well with the rest of the content around it.

Bluemix Weather
Widget / Watson Workspace Links - Brian GleesonThe first project
adds a weather widget to the community overview page of a chosen community,
based on the community's UUID entered in the JSON. If you want it to apply
to all communities, the "match" property of the json can be removed.
This points to an XPages application running on Bluemix and the Weather
Company data from Bluemix and is a great example of integrating all these
technologies into Connections.

The second project
again can be contributed to a specific community using the UUID or to all
communities, by removing the "match" property. This allows posting
to a Watson Workspace defined in a watsonSpaceId property. You'll also
need to set up a Watson Workspace App, adding the appId and appSecret to
the JS file.

Floyd - Daniele
VistalliA special award
was given to Daniele Vistalli who contributed not a customization per se
but a framework for
running applications or webpages, loading CSS etc. This allows you to add
customizations more easily.

Open BadgesSome time ago
OpenNTF investigated the use of Open Badges to
reward those who get involved with us. It's something we first became aware
of when IBM issued them to IBM Champions, but for various reasons we've
not been in a position to progress it. However, this contest gave us the
opportunity to issue the first Open Badge, to our winners. You'll notice
the badge features a laurel wreath (in pink, the colour associated with
the current developments around IBM Connections) around the new OpenCode4Connections
logo. Thank you to our contest winners for their patience with our faltering
steps on this new journey!

We'll be rolling
Open Badges out wider during the coming months for various initiatives
and you will see how we will vary the badges for our different brands.